one thing about conan that actually helped him get the "late night" job was his reputation for making all of the simpsons writers laugh. perhaps he wasn't the direct creative genius behind each episode, but he certainly, at least indirectly, contributed to the show's "golden years"... and those years are much missed
Now think of Shuttles... Even when they DID fly, they were worthless for boosting the altitude and doing correction maneuvers; the progress ships were the only ones capable of that...
now that's just blatantly wrong... although the progress supply ships are capable of boosting the ISS orbit, shuttles always did that when they visited...
NASA/JPL learned their lesson when the Mars Polar Lander disappeared.
Wrong. The twin MERs were already planned by the time Mars Polar Lander was lost. Also, future probes are not going to be twin missions; for instance in 2007 the Mars Phoenix Lander is going to be a single mission.
they both gave the commencement address for mit's class of 1999... (which sucked for them, btw... the year before it was pres. clinton and TIME's man of the year and AIDS researcher david ho... and then... click and clack? pfaw)... anyways, i think between the they failed the first semester of freshman physics something like _5_ times... (of course, the class historically has a 30% failure rate, but still...)
Tooting my own horn dept: as I said here, Bush's Mars plan is wildly underfunded, and that unless there's serious funding the Mars plan is at best a publicity stunt, and at worst a president micro-managing NASA in a way that will get rid of the few remaining actual science programs. Decomissioning Hubble is exhibit A for that argument.
*sigh* First off, you neglected to read up on how this plan evolved. Sean O'Keefe, the NASA administrator, proposed this idea to Pres. Bush, and Bush gave it his OK. it's been obvious for a while that manned LEO missions are not the future. Furthermore, considering Bush's plan calls for a $1B increase in NASA funding over _5_ years, and plans for the first new moon landing is set for 2015.... it's obvious that Bush's plan is an investment into setting a new vision for NASA, not for implementing it. This is a big difference that I don't think many people fully appreciate.
If you really want to blame someone for decommissioning Hubble 2 years earlier than planned... point the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (The Gehman commission), which as two of its requirements for relaunching the space shuttle mandate that (1) any shuttle that doesn't go to the ISS needs to be able to patch a hole similar to the one in Columbia's wing, successfully, in orbit, and land safely; and (2) that any shuttle that doesn't go to the ISS needs to have a 2nd shuttle ready for launch as a rescue vehicle. Considering the Hubble Service Mission 5 was the only planned non-ISS shuttle mission, it was decidedly not worth the risk.
If I remember correctly, the Mars missions that just landed (sucessfuly!!!) were designed, built, launched, and landed in about 18 months or so. Even with the amount of fine motor skill that would be required, I think repairing the hubble is feasible.
Even if that's true, the Mars missions reused a lot of the hardware and software designs from the 1997 Mars Pathfinder/Sojourner missions. (i think the timescale from project approval to launch was 3 years, btw). If a robot were to be sent to fix Hubble, you would basically be starting from scratch. The design constraints are also completely different, so you can't really use the Mars Exploration Rovers as examples.
First off, I don't understand why people say the Soyuz is more safe than the shuttle. That might be so, but they have very similar safety records; both have two missions lost with complete loss of life; and they have roughly the same number of missions. Also, it's difficult enough to get 2 objects in LEO to meet at a point; now you're talknig about 3? The Hubble, the Soyuz, and the "workhouse rocket." Very, very difficult.
Personally, I think NASA should sign off on one "special" shuttle mission that won't follow the CAIB recommendations (patch for RCC/tile damage, second shuttle ready to fly..). NASA, the White House, and the astronauts will sign a deal acknowledging the inherent risks. Of course, if the shuttle is lost on the Hubble mission, there probably won't be enough shuttles left to finish the ISS....
according to the latest on NASA's marsrover webpage, an additional communication session of ~20 minutes occurred with transmission at 120 bits/sec... hopefully this information will help determine what happened to the Spirit rover 2 days ago...
unfortunately, the landing site of opportunity is less interesting scientifically than spirit's landing site, the gusev crater. a documentary on PBS describes the scientists' discussion of the landing sites; meridiana planum, opportunity's site, was chosen because it was considered a safer target than gusev crater; less sharp pointy rocks and craters to fall onto or into. NOVA: Mars Dead or Alive. I really hope this is just a temporary glitch that can be solved quickly.
as a former mass. resident myself (cambridge), i think that's crap. the majority of funds for the big dig were taken from federal highway funds... i can't find a definitive link online, but i think the feds were supposed to pay for the entire shebang, but cost overruns (to the tune of $6b!) were the responsibility of the commonwealth. furthermore, education funds are primarily taken from local property taxes, so the decline of your local schools is likely due to the declining value of real estate in your area, not some urban renewal project 250 miles away. the need for the big dig is obvious; the lack of quantity and quality of highways to boston are well documented. i'm not trying to defend the big dig administration ($6b over budget and 5 years late is obviously, obviously unacceptable) but to blame your neighborhood problems on it is quite short sighted.
according to mit's database, that machine is registered and run by a student living on-campus, so its existence has no bearing on what the administration feels or will do. they aren't stupid enough to willfully ignore the law if, in fact, the LAMP project is illegal.
It's just ironic that the long-term effects of this strategy were to kill of Boeing's Sonic Cruiser, which it had pinned its hopes on as the airplane to beat Airbus (the descendant of the consortium that built Concorde). As a result, Boeing is reduced to relying on the 747 -- first flown in 1969 -- to compete with Airbus's new superjumbo.
boeing and airbus have diverging opinions on the evolution of the airline industry. airbus thinks bigger is better and has spent billions to develop the A380 super-jumbo jet. boeing responded to what was then the A3XX announcement by drawing up plans for a 747X stretch derivative that would make it almost equal in terms of capacity to the A380.
building the 747X stretch would have involved adding two new fuselage sections to the existing 747-400ER. i'm not sure if this would also mean having to modify the wing design or not, which of course would have been costly (but not nearly as costly as developing the A380 from scratch). after tossing this idea to the airlines, they decided that the super-jumbo just didn't have the interest to merit two competing airliners. superjumbos would require costly modifications to airports, and outside of certain southeast asian routes, won't have enough traffic to make an investment in a 747X worthwhile. boeing brass apparently decided that the future of aircraft development would be smaller, faster aircraft that would be able to service more direct routes (rather than megahubs that the A380 would service, requiring most passengers to transfer to other aircraft to reach their destination).
this philosophy brought about the sonic cruiser. the sonic cruiser was never meant to be supersonic, so any suggestion that the FAA ban on supersonic flight over US territories killed the sonic cruiser is false. boeing tossed the idea to the airlines and decided that such a revolutionary aircraft would be too expensive to develop at this time. right now the boeing company is looking at the 7e7 program, which is a more traditional, but more efficient, aircraft, using more efficient engines, airframe, and wing design, combined with technology to reduce maintenance time and costs.
who will win? who knows... anyways, this was a long digression, but your point that the FAA ban had anythign to do with killing the sonic cruiser is wrong
which part of the article didn't i read? "The decision to terminate both X-33 and X-34 were made internally by NASA and were not a White House decision, [Director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center Arthur] Stephenson said."
politics killed the X-33? NASA was unhappy to have the X-33 cancelled? first off, the bush administration could not by its own right have "killed" the X-33. space.com article. the program was already years behind schedule, hundreds of millions of dollars over budget and would have required huge expenditures in additional research funds to get anywhere near an operational testcraft. no one who had put in over a billion dollars into the X-33 wanted to keep funding it. not NASA, not lockheed. the air force laughed off the suggestion that they step in with the funds to keep the project rolling. the project was an absolute failure. but why let facts get in the way of a good GWB bashing?
It would be MUCH better if the Government provided incentives to the various companies who are attemping to build space transportation systems. Those folks will be in it for profit, and their isn't any profit in destroying your launch systems to meet a schedule.
isn't that what the X-33 project was? NASA gave lockheed close to US$1B to design and build a new SSTO technology, giving lockheed the permission to use this new technology in a commercial version called the venturestar. lockheed took the money and never managed to get a workable model before NASA finally pulled the plug in 2001.
baloney. the failure of columbia had nothing to do with any inability of the spacecraft's flight computers to compensate for wing failure. just before contact was lost for the final time, telemetry reported that columbia's ops thrusters and aerilons were at maximum to attempt to compensate for yaw due to the aerodynamic drag from the failing wing. the limiting factor was control surfaces, not computation intensity...
It's said to cost near one billion US$ to get a new drug on the market...
Keep in mind, that figure includes the cost of research and development on the drug being approved, as well as previous drugs that have failed for various reasons (ineffective, toxic, etc). Neglecting the cost of failed drug research, the cost for each drug would probably cost a factor of 4 or 5 times cheaper than $1B. Still a lot of money, but hey, who said pharma was easy?
As someone who is graduating with a master's in EE from MIT, and who did his undergrad in EE at MIT as well, you have no idea what you're talking about. The current intro EE course that all EE and CS majors are required to take certainly has a strong lab component. The year I took it required us to build a circuit to decode a digital audio stream (encoded by a higher level course, of course). The EE curriculum requires a certain number of engineering design points which are awarded on a course-by-course basis depending on the amount of design and labwork involved in that course. At least one EE lab is required, which involved three laboratory assignments and one final project which was the student's choice. My project was a digital mixer which mixed multiple input sources, with digital EQ on each channel implemented with FIR filters. A lot of the digital design work is done these days in simulation (HSPICE, JSIM, etc); one of the intro classes required us to design a 32-bit microprocessor. To imply from a news story about one intro level EE course about the quality of an entire curriculum is just plain silly.
You forget that the space shuttle is not equipped for such an in-orbit resupply. Sure you can bring up more food, water, oxygen canisters, CO2 scrubbers and what-not, but how about propellant for the maneuvering thrusters? What happens when the fuel cells are bled dry? I doubt those could be easily recharged in orbit, at least without poisoning the crew...
that may be true in humanities, but certainly not in science and engineering. i'm finishing up a masters in EE this year, and have made it with two full years of tuition support in addition to around $1.6k of monthly stipend for living expenses (in cambridge, MA, that just _barely_ covers living expenses). almost everyone i know of has managed to get their tuition support and stipend either through a research assistant appointment or as a teaching assistant.
you are oversimplying things. the soyuz safety record, i believe, is actually worse than the shuttles (the shuttle had 2 catastrophic failures in 140 some-odd flights, the soyuz had 2 catastrophic failures in 130 some-odd flights.. or something to that effect). previous shuttle flights have come back with meteor damage, wing damage, tile damage..
when you get on an airplane, do you assume that if your aircraft is damaged, that united or american will be able to get a spare airplane to transfer the passengers and crew of the striken airliner to the rescue plane? no? is that because the airlines are negligent?
room to play to do what? the shuttle landings are unpowered. if you miss on the first approach, you're toast. no power to try again. you'd probably end up having to ditch the shuttle and bail out. plus, if you land in california or white sands, you have to get the shuttle back to florida, which costs several million dollars and you risk damaging the shuttle in the process. (in fact, i think the first time it was tried, the shuttle started shedding apart before the plane even took off)
as far as launching in california, originally the plan was to have a second launch site at vandenburg afb, for military use. i required several billions of dollars and had no practical purpose. considering the military doesn't use the shuttle anymore, it's doubtful that a second launch site will ever be considered.
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one thing about conan that actually helped him get the "late night" job was his reputation for making all of the simpsons writers laugh. perhaps he wasn't the direct creative genius behind each episode, but he certainly, at least indirectly, contributed to the show's "golden years"... and those years are much missed
now that's just blatantly wrong... although the progress supply ships are capable of boosting the ISS orbit, shuttles always did that when they visited...
Wrong. The twin MERs were already planned by the time Mars Polar Lander was lost. Also, future probes are not going to be twin missions; for instance in 2007 the Mars Phoenix Lander is going to be a single mission.
actually it's $1b total, not $1b/yr for 5 years... sorry if i wasn't clear...
they both gave the commencement address for mit's class of 1999... (which sucked for them, btw... the year before it was pres. clinton and TIME's man of the year and AIDS researcher david ho... and then... click and clack? pfaw)... anyways, i think between the they failed the first semester of freshman physics something like _5_ times... (of course, the class historically has a 30% failure rate, but still...)
*sigh* First off, you neglected to read up on how this plan evolved. Sean O'Keefe, the NASA administrator, proposed this idea to Pres. Bush, and Bush gave it his OK. it's been obvious for a while that manned LEO missions are not the future. Furthermore, considering Bush's plan calls for a $1B increase in NASA funding over _5_ years, and plans for the first new moon landing is set for 2015.... it's obvious that Bush's plan is an investment into setting a new vision for NASA, not for implementing it. This is a big difference that I don't think many people fully appreciate.
If you really want to blame someone for decommissioning Hubble 2 years earlier than planned... point the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (The Gehman commission), which as two of its requirements for relaunching the space shuttle mandate that (1) any shuttle that doesn't go to the ISS needs to be able to patch a hole similar to the one in Columbia's wing, successfully, in orbit, and land safely; and (2) that any shuttle that doesn't go to the ISS needs to have a 2nd shuttle ready for launch as a rescue vehicle. Considering the Hubble Service Mission 5 was the only planned non-ISS shuttle mission, it was decidedly not worth the risk.
Even if that's true, the Mars missions reused a lot of the hardware and software designs from the 1997 Mars Pathfinder/Sojourner missions. (i think the timescale from project approval to launch was 3 years, btw). If a robot were to be sent to fix Hubble, you would basically be starting from scratch. The design constraints are also completely different, so you can't really use the Mars Exploration Rovers as examples.
First off, I don't understand why people say the Soyuz is more safe than the shuttle. That might be so, but they have very similar safety records; both have two missions lost with complete loss of life; and they have roughly the same number of missions. Also, it's difficult enough to get 2 objects in LEO to meet at a point; now you're talknig about 3? The Hubble, the Soyuz, and the "workhouse rocket." Very, very difficult.
Personally, I think NASA should sign off on one "special" shuttle mission that won't follow the CAIB recommendations (patch for RCC/tile damage, second shuttle ready to fly..). NASA, the White House, and the astronauts will sign a deal acknowledging the inherent risks. Of course, if the shuttle is lost on the Hubble mission, there probably won't be enough shuttles left to finish the ISS....
according to the latest on NASA's marsrover webpage, an additional communication session of ~20 minutes occurred with transmission at 120 bits/sec... hopefully this information will help determine what happened to the Spirit rover 2 days ago...
unfortunately, the landing site of opportunity is less interesting scientifically than spirit's landing site, the gusev crater. a documentary on PBS describes the scientists' discussion of the landing sites; meridiana planum, opportunity's site, was chosen because it was considered a safer target than gusev crater; less sharp pointy rocks and craters to fall onto or into. NOVA: Mars Dead or Alive. I really hope this is just a temporary glitch that can be solved quickly.
as a former mass. resident myself (cambridge), i think that's crap. the majority of funds for the big dig were taken from federal highway funds... i can't find a definitive link online, but i think the feds were supposed to pay for the entire shebang, but cost overruns (to the tune of $6b!) were the responsibility of the commonwealth. furthermore, education funds are primarily taken from local property taxes, so the decline of your local schools is likely due to the declining value of real estate in your area, not some urban renewal project 250 miles away. the need for the big dig is obvious; the lack of quantity and quality of highways to boston are well documented. i'm not trying to defend the big dig administration ($6b over budget and 5 years late is obviously, obviously unacceptable) but to blame your neighborhood problems on it is quite short sighted.
according to mit's database, that machine is registered and run by a student living on-campus, so its existence has no bearing on what the administration feels or will do. they aren't stupid enough to willfully ignore the law if, in fact, the LAMP project is illegal.
boeing and airbus have diverging opinions on the evolution of the airline industry. airbus thinks bigger is better and has spent billions to develop the A380 super-jumbo jet. boeing responded to what was then the A3XX announcement by drawing up plans for a 747X stretch derivative that would make it almost equal in terms of capacity to the A380.
building the 747X stretch would have involved adding two new fuselage sections to the existing 747-400ER. i'm not sure if this would also mean having to modify the wing design or not, which of course would have been costly (but not nearly as costly as developing the A380 from scratch). after tossing this idea to the airlines, they decided that the super-jumbo just didn't have the interest to merit two competing airliners. superjumbos would require costly modifications to airports, and outside of certain southeast asian routes, won't have enough traffic to make an investment in a 747X worthwhile. boeing brass apparently decided that the future of aircraft development would be smaller, faster aircraft that would be able to service more direct routes (rather than megahubs that the A380 would service, requiring most passengers to transfer to other aircraft to reach their destination).
this philosophy brought about the sonic cruiser. the sonic cruiser was never meant to be supersonic, so any suggestion that the FAA ban on supersonic flight over US territories killed the sonic cruiser is false. boeing tossed the idea to the airlines and decided that such a revolutionary aircraft would be too expensive to develop at this time. right now the boeing company is looking at the 7e7 program, which is a more traditional, but more efficient, aircraft, using more efficient engines, airframe, and wing design, combined with technology to reduce maintenance time and costs.
who will win? who knows... anyways, this was a long digression, but your point that the FAA ban had anythign to do with killing the sonic cruiser is wrong
Nope.. the Soyuz has had two accidents with casualties, Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11. In fact its safety record is about the same as the shuttle. link
which part of the article didn't i read? "The decision to terminate both X-33 and X-34 were made internally by NASA and were not a White House decision, [Director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center Arthur] Stephenson said."
politics killed the X-33? NASA was unhappy to have the X-33 cancelled? first off, the bush administration could not by its own right have "killed" the X-33. space.com article. the program was already years behind schedule, hundreds of millions of dollars over budget and would have required huge expenditures in additional research funds to get anywhere near an operational testcraft. no one who had put in over a billion dollars into the X-33 wanted to keep funding it. not NASA, not lockheed. the air force laughed off the suggestion that they step in with the funds to keep the project rolling. the project was an absolute failure. but why let facts get in the way of a good GWB bashing?
isn't that what the X-33 project was? NASA gave lockheed close to US$1B to design and build a new SSTO technology, giving lockheed the permission to use this new technology in a commercial version called the venturestar. lockheed took the money and never managed to get a workable model before NASA finally pulled the plug in 2001.
baloney. the failure of columbia had nothing to do with any inability of the spacecraft's flight computers to compensate for wing failure. just before contact was lost for the final time, telemetry reported that columbia's ops thrusters and aerilons were at maximum to attempt to compensate for yaw due to the aerodynamic drag from the failing wing. the limiting factor was control surfaces, not computation intensity...
Keep in mind, that figure includes the cost of research and development on the drug being approved, as well as previous drugs that have failed for various reasons (ineffective, toxic, etc). Neglecting the cost of failed drug research, the cost for each drug would probably cost a factor of 4 or 5 times cheaper than $1B. Still a lot of money, but hey, who said pharma was easy?
As someone who is graduating with a master's in EE from MIT, and who did his undergrad in EE at MIT as well, you have no idea what you're talking about. The current intro EE course that all EE and CS majors are required to take certainly has a strong lab component. The year I took it required us to build a circuit to decode a digital audio stream (encoded by a higher level course, of course). The EE curriculum requires a certain number of engineering design points which are awarded on a course-by-course basis depending on the amount of design and labwork involved in that course. At least one EE lab is required, which involved three laboratory assignments and one final project which was the student's choice. My project was a digital mixer which mixed multiple input sources, with digital EQ on each channel implemented with FIR filters. A lot of the digital design work is done these days in simulation (HSPICE, JSIM, etc); one of the intro classes required us to design a 32-bit microprocessor. To imply from a news story about one intro level EE course about the quality of an entire curriculum is just plain silly.
You forget that the space shuttle is not equipped for such an in-orbit resupply. Sure you can bring up more food, water, oxygen canisters, CO2 scrubbers and what-not, but how about propellant for the maneuvering thrusters? What happens when the fuel cells are bled dry? I doubt those could be easily recharged in orbit, at least without poisoning the crew...
that may be true in humanities, but certainly not in science and engineering. i'm finishing up a masters in EE this year, and have made it with two full years of tuition support in addition to around $1.6k of monthly stipend for living expenses (in cambridge, MA, that just _barely_ covers living expenses). almost everyone i know of has managed to get their tuition support and stipend either through a research assistant appointment or as a teaching assistant.
you are oversimplying things. the soyuz safety record, i believe, is actually worse than the shuttles (the shuttle had 2 catastrophic failures in 140 some-odd flights, the soyuz had 2 catastrophic failures in 130 some-odd flights.. or something to that effect). previous shuttle flights have come back with meteor damage, wing damage, tile damage..
probably wouldn't have been very useful, considering columbia wasn't carrying the canadarm...
when you get on an airplane, do you assume that if your aircraft is damaged, that united or american will be able to get a spare airplane to transfer the passengers and crew of the striken airliner to the rescue plane? no? is that because the airlines are negligent?
as far as launching in california, originally the plan was to have a second launch site at vandenburg afb, for military use. i required several billions of dollars and had no practical purpose. considering the military doesn't use the shuttle anymore, it's doubtful that a second launch site will ever be considered.